Quotes by Belgian Authors - Page 7

There is only one way to overcome the difficulty of writing, and that is to write. Thought only becomes effective and productive at the time of writing.
Amélie Nothomb
Is happiness a sort of blissful state of mind or just a kind of surreal propensity? It may be hard to recognize its very nature, if we remain guilelessly confined in a state of woeful unawareness or in a no-man’s-land of emotions. In their dogged and obstinate quest for the zenith of happiness, many forget to take pleasure in the small things of everyday and, thus, become disgruntled and depressed instead, which leads them to a mire of gloom. ("C’est quand le bonheur “)
Erik Pevernagie
Expectations are at war, if good feeling and discomfort clash. When we are expecting zest and joy, our good karma may be ousted by distress and frustration, if negative downbeat waves are emitted. Just with a feel of realism, without prejudice, should we step into the future. What will be, will be. Only the fortune of war will tell, since life may be war or peace. ("Fish for silence.")
Erik Pevernagie
Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.
May Sarton
You either live to become an anchor of inspiration for those around you, or you live to become an anchor for a lesson for them. Whatever you become, it is entirely up to you to decide.
Jellis Vaes
We are sometimes astounded by the behavior of emotional outlaws, as they act in line with their own standards, but proceed like bulls-in-a-china-shop, create one heck of a mess in their living environment and bring about shocking disturbing dissensions, ever since their inner construction clashes with our emotional architecture. (“Disruption”)
Erik Pevernagie
Beauty is not a warrant for wellbeing and so does happiness not hinge on social success, but is only tangible via intricate, meandering discovery journeys in the mind. ("Absence of beauty was like hell")
Erik Pevernagie
If we misread the blueprint of our life, we need not be ashamed of backtracking on our chosen options. Admitting to mistakes may make us human and maybe great again. ("Sisyphus' hardship on the hill")
Erik Pevernagie
People live on the flow of the daily reality and they surge on the waves of hazy expectations. They can experience pleasant junctures and try to catch and enjoy each special moment that is offered to them. Until life takes them by surprise.
Erik Pevernagie
Love is blind. Love of money is blind. Greed and money make people forfeit the quiddity of life, banish them from what is essential and alienate them from themselves. They lose their identity and become drifting exiles. ( "Money rocking and rolling" )
Erik Pevernagie
As gold and silver are weighed in pure water, so does the soul test its weight in silence, and the words that we let fall have no meaning apart from the silence that wraps them round.
Maurice Maeterlinck
When we are “time traveling”, we may trip over problems from the past which distort our memory. If we are weary of dealing with lost causes or lame ducks in our history, we have to make up our mind and give up destructive thinking patterns. At that juncture, time has come to go back to the future. ( “A glimpse of the future" )
Erik Pevernagie
The main thing for inner contentment is to be in a state of grace. And there is an artistic state of grace, for art is a kind of religion.
Georges Rodenbach
Consumption can be a remedy against boredom and may convey a sense of fictitious power and supremacy, by standing out from the crowd through the extravagance of the expenditure. As it becomes an addiction, however, it might be cured, if the right medication is administered : humbleness and mindful discovery of the others. (“Buying now, dying later”)
Erik Pevernagie
We thought of [New York] as a free city, like one of those storied prewar tropical nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions.
Luc Sante
When love becomes a play of squirming mindgames or a tinderbox of mental conflicts, emotional benchmarks need an unremitting reset. ("Another empty room")
Erik Pevernagie
Some men can be good ' horse whisperers ' and many dogs can be wonderful ' man whisperers '.
Erik Pevernagie
When we stay locked up in the spectrum of unsolved life stories and keep hiding in an arcane prism, life remains a mystery behind perpetual tensions and a journey in a world beyond appearances. (“Une femme peut en cacher une autre")
Erik Pevernagie
Truly they who know still know nothing if the strength of love be not theirs; for the true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind. He who sees without loving is only straining his eyes in the darkness.
Maurice Maeterlinck
When love is roaming in our mind, looping in the deepest fringes of our heart, undreamt spaciousness emerges, repealing the constraints of triviality and letting stifling narrowness fade away. While our mindset is besieged by a revolving burst of emotion, our world is ultimately opening up. (Cape of good hope)
Erik Pevernagie
What is destructive is impatience haste expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
We need not be afraid of expecting the unexpected, but let us wheedle each instant we enjoy and endear each happy moment we encounter; let us watch each step we take and each move we make, ever since happiness is a loving and appealing fairy, but utterly frail and vulnerable. ("Happy days are back again")
Erik Pevernagie
That was the day I knew. It was as if Rolls met Royce, Black met Decker, Oliver met Stan, TinTin met Snowy, Marks met Spencer... he was to me what Patracolus was to Achilles, Hylas to Hercules, Enkidoe to Gilgamesh, Jonathan to David, Bosie to Oscar Wilde, Rimbaud to Verlaine. He was my Billy Budd, all the holy multitude of Thebes, Jasjoe mixed with Tadzio...
Tom Bouden
Don't be sad because i'm dying, be happy because very second another great human being is born, another great person who gets the chance to do better things than i did.
Emma Claeys
Even if only one person’s respect for animals increases, then writing Talon would have been worthwhile.
Christopher Gérard
It always amazes me how people in Europe and the United States can be so indifferent to the speeches of their chancellor or president, for these worlds from the top can be a wind sock for what might happen next.
Paul Rusesabagina
Let us doom and gloom not creep into our day and lust for life not wither away. With the future as brother-in-arms, steps in the unknown should not frighten. ("Steps in the unknown" )
Erik Pevernagie
The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.
Magritte
When we are children, play comes to us naturally, but our capacity for play collapses as we age. Sex often remains the last arena of play we can permit ourselves, a bridge to our childhood. Long after the mind has been filled with injunctions to be serious, the body remains a free zone, unencumbered by reason and judgment. In lovemaking, we can recapture the utterly uninhibited movement of the child, who has not yet developed self-consciousness before the judging gaze of others.
Esther Perel
Women emerging like aliens in a hesitant future, in a men’s world with impervious codes, may feel like dots in an uncharted territory. Discovering the crucial points, which don't line up with the unbearability of reality, may be a key to the right compass in life. ( "Terra incognita")
Erik Pevernagie
The ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes; these are entombed in their names, their works, their constructions. New York's ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.
Luc Sante
When the river of emotions bursts its banks and expectations go over the edges of reality, the brain creates hallucinations. Ringxiety-stricken people feel illusive vibrating alerts and hear phantom phone rings, since absence of ringing generates scaring emptiness and destroys their self-esteem. ("Kein Schwein ruft mich an" )
Erik Pevernagie
To learn to love, one must first learn to see.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Some details in life may look insignificant but appear to be vital leitmotifs in a person's life. They may have the value of "Rosebuds" of Citizen Kane or "Madeleine cookies" of Marcel Proust or "Strawberry fields" of the Beatles. People regularly walk down the memory lane of their early youth. The paper boats of their childhood are recurrently floating on the waves of their mind and bring back the mood and the spirit of the early days. They enable us to retreat from the trivial, daily worries and can generate delightful bliss and true joy in a sometimes frantic and chaotic life. ("Paper boats forever" )
Erik Pevernagie
The most important relationship in your life is the relationship you have with yourself. Because no matter what happens, you will always be with yourself.
Diane Von Furstenberg
In all truth might it be said that beauty is the unique aliment of our soul, for in all places does it search for beauty, and it perishes not of hunger even in the most degraded of lives. For indeed nothing of beauty can pass by and be altogether unperceived. Perhaps does it never pass by save only in our unconsciousness, but its action is no less puissant in gloom of night than by light of day; the joy it procures may be less tangible, but other difference there is none.
Maurice Maeterlinck
All those who prefer peace to power, and happiness to glory should thank the colonized people for their civilizing mission. By liberating themselves, they made Europeans more modest, less racist, and more human. Let us hope that the process continues and that the Americans are obliged to follow the same course. When one’s own cause is unjust, defeat can be liberating.
Jean Bricmont
Justice is the very last thing of all wherewith the universe concerns itself. It is equilibrium that absorbs its attention; and what we term justice is truly nothing but this equilibrium transformed, as honey is nothing but a transformation of the sweetness found in the flower. Outside man there is no justice; within him injustice cannot be.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Espere" in Spanish, is the one word covering two meanings: "waiting" and "hoping". If life, however, offers no expectation or prospect, waiting represents time "wasted”. Waiting needs a future. If not, time is condemned to be "killed". In the event that we are lost in a gap of boredom and despair, we are driven back in a vacuum of senselessness and deadlocked in a point of nothingness. We are, so therefore, bound to watch the agony of "time". ("Waiting for a place behind the geraniums " )
Erik Pevernagie
The sun finally died in beauty, flinging out its crimson flames, which cast their reflection on the faces of passers-by, giving them a strangely feverish look. The darkness of the trees became deeper. You could hear the Seine flowing. Sounds carried farther, and people in their beds could feel, as they did every night, the vibration of the ground as buses rolled past.
Georges Simenon
The mere ambition to write a poem is enough to kill it.
Henri Michaux
The world is alive, and just as we humans draw energy from connection with other human beings, so we do too from this world.
Jellis Vaes
When we allow ourselves to show some patience and take time to listen to the others, we may learn a lot about ourselves. Patience does not endure instant gratification, though, and self-knowledge may take a lifetime. (“I am on my own side, but I can listen “ )
Erik Pevernagie
If you feel unhappy, sick or depressed, spend more time in nature and you will come to see the colors of life, you’ll come to experience the amazing changes that this world can do for you. The wonder of the purest and most honest beauty there is, one that is not here to define anyone or anything, but simply to let you see why this life is so worth living.
Jellis Vaes
For the discovery of self we have to overcome the fear of self, so as to find the marrow ‘within’ and disclose our ‘true’ self. ("Everybody his story")
Erik Pevernagie
It is time I came back to my real lifeAfter this voyage to an island with no name,Where I lay down at sunrise drunk with light.
May Sarton
I've never had any rights in this country and I'm happy to renounce any I'm supposed to have. That way they can't bother me.
Dimitri Verhulst
Nothing in the whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor is there anything to which beauty clings so readily. There is nothing in the world capable of such spontaneous up-lifting, of such speedy ennoblement; nothing that offers more scrupulous obedience to the pure and noble command it receives.
Maurice Maeterlinck
When a woman becomes her own best friend life is easier.
Diane Von Furstenberg
(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")
Maurice Maeterlinck
Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.
René Magritte
If we go down the rabbit hole of our unconsciousness and try to unravel the knotty points of our life story we may encounter a bunch of hidden niceties or emotional stowaways. Forgotten details in the windmill of our mind may daintily reveal, where things might have gone wrong. (“I wonder what went wrong.”)
Erik Pevernagie
An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness.
Maurice Maeterlinck
When words remain unspoken and emotions are left unexpressed, just a glint in the eyes from otherness can inflame the mind and rouse a shower of empathy. ("Only needed a light ")
Erik Pevernagie
A lot of the names in Talon reference other people or events. For example Amelia, the giant Eagle, was a “tip of my hat” to the extraordinary aviator Amelia Earhart. Both love(d) to fly!
Christopher Gérard
Material and technical changes are mostly quite visible. But less visible are the changes in the mind of the people, their way of thinking, their conception of the world and the quality of their fears. ("Horizon and Vision" )
Erik Pevernagie
But when we reduce sex to a function, we also invoke the idea of dysfunction. We are no longer talking about the art of sex; rather, we are talking about the mechanics of sex. Science has replaced religion as the authority; and science is a more formidable arbiter. Medicine knows how to scare even those who scoff at religion. Compared with a diagnosis, what's a mere sin? We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.
Esther Perel
He who knows himself is wise; yet have we no sooner acquired real consciousness of our being than we learn that true wisdom is a thing that lies far deeper than consciousness. The chief gain of increased consciousness is that it unveils an ever-loftier unconsciousness, on whose heights do the sources lie of the purest wisdom.
Maurice Maeterlinck
I can tell you that solitudeIs not all exaltation, inner spaceWhere the soul breaths and work can be done.Solitude exposes the nerve,Raises up ghosts.The past, never at rest, flows through it.
May Sarton
Look, you can say that life is meaningless, because in the end we are all no more than dust in the wind and all that we do will ultimately be forgotten in hundreds or thousands of years’ time. But do you really want to live with that belief? Give yourself a higher meaning, give yourself a purpose why you were given this life. I am not a religious person but I do believe that we are all given this life for a reason, and that death is only the beginning of something bigger. Call me crazy, I don’t care. It gives me sense and an urgency to make this life count because I know it matters. You feel that way because you do not have that. Give this life a meaning and all that you do and will come to do will become meaningful instead of meaningless
Jellis Vaes